Re: How the father of the World Wide Web plans to reclaim it from Facebook and Google

On 2016-08-11 15:16, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> Really good article, mentions Solid and other technologies.  WebID is mentioned by the author in the comments too ...
>
> http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-web/

One of the problems with the Web is that there is no easy way letting a provider know where you come from (=where your Web resources are).  This is one reason why OpenID rather created more centralization.  The same problem is in payments where the credit-card number is used to find your bank through complex centralized registers.

Both of these use-cases can be addressed by having URLs + other related data such as keys in something like a digital wallet which you carry around.

There is a snag though: Since each use-case needs special logic, keys, attributes etc. it seems hard (probably impossible), coming up with a generic Web-browser solution making such schemes rely on extending the Web-browser through native-mode platform-specific code.

Although W3C officials do not even acknowledge the mere existence(!) of such work, the progress on native extensions schemes has actually been pretty good:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webappsec/2016Aug/0005.html

This is approach to decentralization is BTW not (anymore) a research project, it is fully testable in close to production-like settings today:
https://test.webpki.org/webpay-merchant

The native extensions also support a _decentralized_development_model_for_Web_technology_, something which is clearly missing in world where a single browser vendor has 80% of the mobile browser market!

Anders

Received on Friday, 12 August 2016 04:47:08 UTC